Paul, greatly appreciate your response and thoughts. You've clearly done more study on this as I am a bit new to it. But, I'd like to respond to a few of your questions and comments.
Life and consciousness
Some say “life” should not be a term of science? That seems a bit extreme given all the science going on to study life in all its forms.
Chalmers is cited as agreeing with Goff that there is not an equivalence between life and consciousness, but not sure if you agree with this or not. I am persuaded that while there are similarities, Pigliucci’s point that panpsychism is the equivalent to elan vital is not supportable.
Is qualitative science still science? It seems that I may have miscommunicated that I think reports about experiences are non-scientific. I don’t. In fact, I think that in the study of consciousness too little attention is paid by the physicalists to the massive documentation of extreme phenomena. I agree with James and Meyers in believing that we can only really understand consciousness if we take these extreme experiences as part of the whole picture. Goff’s bifurcation of qualitative and quantitative science is helpful I think and considering that both are legitimate forms of science it seems to me to answer the question raised by many that consciousness is beyond science.
Your comment:
“It's hard to accept the fact that in one breath panpsychists happily admit that panpsychism is “counterintuitive” and in the next breath they say it is “simple” or “parsimonious”. Indeed it can hardly be said that a belief that rocks may contain or have experiences is simple. So why “simple”? In addition, there are many arguments that state that simplicity needn't be a sign of truth. In fact in many instances a trust in theoretical simplicity had be shown to be very counterproductive in both science and philosophy.”
Couldn’t agree with you more. I can’t see panpsychism as simple other than a simple answer to the problem of why we can’t so far find a physicalist solution to the mind-brain problem. It also seems “simple” and therefore philosophically more acceptable by evading to some degree the challenges of dualism and other explanations including the unus mundus of Pauli and Jung. But it can’t be simple in the sense of rocks, iphones and livers having feelings (Koch referred to the last two items). Goff’s statement that the properties of particles, mass, charge and spin ARE consciousness is unsupported and perhaps unsupportable. It’s very similar to Koch’s contradictory statements that the network of connections in IIT ARE consciousness, not that they produce it.
On the issue of NDE’s I’ve referenced several times what I see as a “wave of the hand”dismissal of these and other psi or extreme experiences. The Churchland’s as I understand it stand with Dennett in essentially rejecting consciousness because of the belief that it either must emerge from matter or must be discounted. OK, that’s a philosophical position but also represents a deadend for science it seems. Blackmore has posed a number of alternative suggestions to NDEs and these have been answered in many cases by the Kelly’s from University of Virginia, as well as Pim van Lommel and others.
I need to take a closer look at Hameroff’s ideas on this, and am working right now on a post on the Penrose-Hameroff quantum ideas of consciousness. It is my understanding that Hameroff does take NDEs seriously but it is also my understanding that he and Penrose require some form of panpsychism or proto-consciousness for their theory to work.
Your questions about information leaking and how consciousness can operate outside of a body in my mind gets close to the essential questions we need to be asking. Maybe it doesn’t and that would resolve some big issues. But, if it is shown to be the case, then the really big questions arise.
